The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  His saying my name made me feel strange. Guchkov walked our halls with an air of celebrity. Now I’d gotten a private audience. Yet it was not for doing anything outstanding, or even for being an honorable outlaw, but for a dirty, opportunistic maneuver.

  “Well?”

  “I didn’t start it…,” I said, and launched into the story about the chessboard, leaving out the boy’s earlier mockery. I could feel Guchkov making a study of me as I blathered on. Every word that left my mouth I regretted as soon as I spoke it. Even as my nostrils streamed snot, I tried to summon my alter ego—that fine, austere boy who’d never abase himself with excuses. But my doppelgänger had abandoned me. I felt my face getting wet. Something had come loose in me.

  Finally, Guchkov stopped me. “Here we don’t use our claws to settle matters. Is that understood?”

  I nodded.

  “Speak up.”

  Now that I was expected to speak, I fell mute.

  “You understand plain Russian?” he snapped.

  I managed an affirmative.

  “And English, too?”

  I felt my body go stiff.

  “You’re an amerikanchik, aren’t you?”

  Inside my chest, my heart was pounding like a canary trying to get out of its cage. I couldn’t take a normal breath.

  “What are you afraid of? We aren’t sending you there.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Not afraid?”

  “Not American,” I said. The taunts still rang in my ears. I could hear them now. Enemy. Enemy. “My mother and father were,” I said.

  His half-hooded eyes watched me. “Why ‘were’?”

  “They’re dead,” I told him without blinking.

  I might have even believed it. At that moment, I might have even wished it.

  Mark Pavlovich said nothing. He reached his hand underneath his collar and from some recess under his shirt produced a long chain with a brass key. Deftly, he removed the chain from around his neck, and I watched as he crouched to open a drawer in his desk. Above the horizon of the desk I saw his shoulder and limply hanging sleeve. For the first time I understood that even simple movements were not totally natural to him, that he had to turn his whole body to work the lock, as though he were twisting a stubborn screw. At last he got the drawer open and removed something—a heavy leather ledger that he placed on the desk. He found a piece of paper and slid it across to me. “You’re old enough to write.”

  With my heart still pounding I understood what the ledger contained. The page he’d turned to was full of addresses.

  He stood up and walked around to where I sat. He placed the inkwell beside me. I held the pen he’d given me tightly, but my mind was blank.

  Mark Pavlovich began to dictate. “Zdrastvui dorogaya mamochka…”

  I took down his words like a scribe. He glanced down at my uneven penmanship. “There is a ‘v’ in the first word….Oh, it’s not important. Let’s keep going.”

  My first letter to my mother turned out to be four sentences long. “It is warm here,” it began, and concluded with: “I have made a friend. His name is Kolya.”

  “What now?” I said.

  “What do you think? Write, ‘Kiss you, your son Yulik.’ ”

  From another drawer in his desk, Guchkov produced an envelope. Finding the right entry in the ledger, he copied over the infamous address of the prison where the letter was to travel. Once he was done, he placed the ledger back inside his desk and locked it with his key.

  I watched the long chain and the glint of brass disappear again under the director’s rough linen shirt, secreted to a place to which only he could gain access. “That’s enough for today,” he said. “You’ll have more to write next time.”

  —

  AS FOR MY FRIEND KOLYA—I’d met him in the mess hall. He was two years older, though one wouldn’t know it. He was thin, stalk-necked, and albino-pale. His slitty eyes ought to have made him look furtive, but instead he seemed to glance out of them almost serenely, as if wherever he found himself was just a place to pass through. I tried to start a conversation with him by praising the food.

  “Yeah, a real health resort. Are you going to eat your candies?” he said.

  I looked at my tin plate, where lay two wrapped barbariski. It was Sunday, and this was our treat for the Seventh of November holiday. I’d watched him spend the meal biting off little bits of his sausage and stuffing them in his pocket. Since I hadn’t objected, he grabbed my candies and did the same.

  “Hey!”

  “Too late. What’s fallen off the wagon is gone.”

  I was loath to start a fight with a runt, especially since his swipe seemed almost like a gesture of friendliness, and a friend was what I needed most. Taking food out of the cafeteria was against the rules. “They’ll make you turn out your pockets,” I warned him.

  “And what are you, House Management?”

  Within a few weeks, he was hoisting me over the metal gate behind the broken-down cattle shed. On the other side of the gate was the wooded path that led to the main road that went to the town bazaar. On this day—some time after my audience with Guchkov—the recent snow had melted and the ground was muddy, tracked with boots and hoofprints. It sucked at our shoes as we walked. Once we were out of view of the children’s home, Kolya pulled down his trousers to piss in a stand of black pines. He tucked his shirt back into his underpants, and then unhooked something from inside his pants. It was a mitten attached with a bobby pin to the inside of his trousers, just beneath the pocket lining. He stuck his finger through the hole at the bottom of his pocket and wiggled it to show me how he’d sneaked out the food. Inside the pinned mitten were pieces of kielbasa and the candies. Also, a piece of a broken comb, a cigarette butt, and some matches. Now that we were out in the elements, Kolya smoked openly, like a grown-up, offering me a few drags on his cigarette in thanks for my sweets.

  “What are you going to do with the candy?”

  “Trade it.”

  “For what?”

  “A whistle.”

  “Did you trade for the pin?”

  “No, I took that from my aunt Marusia’s house. Found it in her box of buttons. She doesn’t live too far.”

  “Why aren’t you with her, then?”

  “I like it here. Anyway, when Mama comes back from the nick, I’ll live with her.”

  I felt myself go cold again. Never before had I heard a kid talk about his mother being in lockup, let alone volunteer it as casually as Kolya did.

  “What did she do, your mother?”

  “She pulled babies out of women.”

  “Delivered them.”

  “No, she pulled them out with her knitting needles before they got to be big. If the women didn’t want ’em.”

  “Did they scream?”

  “The women, sure. Not the babies. They were just guts and blood by the time she pulled ’em out.”

  “You mean you saw it?”

  “Sure. I’d look when she went to toss out the slop bucket. There was hair sometimes, but mostly guts.”

  “And your papa?”

  “Froze in a snowbank. Yours both dead?”

  I hesitated. “My father might be,” I heard myself say. “My mother, she’s in a camp.” My honesty surprised me. Kolya had gotten the truth out of me without anything like the invasive procedures of which he’d spoken so casually.

  “She an enemy?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, they had to send her off for something or another.”

  I felt the old feeling of unworthiness attach itself to me again. I’d been asking myself this very question for many months. In my mind, one explanation overshadowed the others. Now I wanted to test it out, to see if it could survive in the open air. “We had an iron bust of Lenin in our room. Mama used to crack walnuts with the bottom of it.” The solid iron bust had made a perfect nutcracker. I remembered my father once warned her that if anyone saw her cracking nuts like that she’d be
thrown “inside.”

  “With Lenin!” A reassuringly horrified look came over Kolya’s face. “My mama said she loved Lenin more than life!”

  It wasn’t my first time at the bazaar. We were permitted to walk there on Sundays when chaperoned by older kids, who’d be given a few kopeks to buy us ice cream or a newspaper funnel’s worth of sunflower seeds. It was everyone’s favorite place, an ever-changing landscape—orderly and energetic in the morning, filled with crowds all afternoon, disheveled like a street after a parade by early twilight. Kolya, however, was going there not as a spectator but to engage in commerce. I followed him from stall to stall as he attempted to barter.

  “Babushka, a few coins for the sweets?”

  No sooner had we embarked on our bartering project than a shriek came from one of the sellers.

  “Thieves! Robbing their children’s home.” She was shouting from behind a pyramid of carrots and beets, waving her pink, frostbitten hands in the air. “They feed and clothe you vermin, and you steal from the state!”

  “Calm down, Auntie! This is mine. I didn’t steal from anyone.”

  “Liars and thieves! They come here to hawk the clothes off their backs for cigarettes. Another one of them was here already, selling off his scarf.”

  “Not us, Auntie,” Kolya said. “Someone shut this horse up.”

  “Who do you think it was?” I wondered aloud as we walked back in the dimming light. I already had my own suspicion.

  “Baldy, I bet.”

  Baldy was more like a savage dwarf than a real child. I’d seen him torture the stray cats that prowled around the play yard—binding their limbs and tossing them against tree trunks. He’d paralyzed one by bursting its pelvis. He’d chase smaller kids away from the swings and merry-go-round, before suspending himself from the playground equipment derisively. His wild laugh marked him with the unmistakable brand of the criminal. We all suspected him of mental deficiencies, but this only gave him a kind of superiority over the others.

  “How did he get a name like Baldy if he isn’t bald?” I said.

  “His head was covered with bloody wounds when he arrived,” Kolya explained. “He lived in a train yard and gambled with the hobos na volosianku.” He elucidated the rules of this game: “If he won, they gave him food; if he lost, he’d let them yank a tuft of hair from his head.”

  When I first arrived at Memory of Krupskaya I had found it difficult to keep my eyes off of Baldy, though I was careful not to glance so long as to provoke a fight. To look at Baldy too long was to nurse a desire for suicide. Instead of making him civilized, the children’s home had only given him free rein to become more rabid. Lately, he had started flouting the rules of fair fighting, which mandated using only fists and ceasing at the first sign of blood. To pull a knife, as Baldy had done during his latest fight with a new boy, was a violation of the order. It necessitated an immediate intervention. Someone had run to Guchkov, and soon the director was there, parting the oglers and dragging Baldy off by the collar with his one, surprisingly strong arm. When Guchkov returned, he removed his fedora from his head and said that anyone else carrying any kind of weapon should place it in his hat immediately. Two boys stepped forward to drop in their tiny, dull blades, the ones I’d sometimes seen them tossing like darts at the trees. “The next knife I confiscate, you’ll be doing more than just shoveling pig shit all month,” he’d warned.

  It was bitterly cold as we walked back toward the children’s home. The frozen ground crunched underfoot. “Should we tell?” I asked Kolya.

  “Why stick our necks out?”

  A few days later, Baldy was pulled out of morning lineup. “Where’s the scarf we issued you?” Mark Pavlovich inquired.

  A scornful smile played on the boy’s lips. “Lost it.”

  “We pay money for everything here,” the director said, pacing down the lineup. Still addressing Baldy, he added, “You liked picking potatoes so much last month. This month you can enjoy chopping our winter firewood.”

  Pretending to look at Mark Pavlovich, we were all really trying to watch Baldy, who had tucked his left arm behind his back in order to mimic the strutting step of Guchkov’s march. A lewd snicker spread among a cohort of the older kids. Baldy had caught the director’s pedantic walk and the uneven wiggle of his behind. Even those who thought the imitation vicious tittered unwillingly. It pained me to see the war hero Guchkov mocked behind his back. Since being reassured that the secret of my mother’s penal address was safe with him, I was more devoted to him than ever. Now I felt my body go prickly with a desire to pounce on Baldy. His malice I could stomach, but not his passing off his spite as noble rebellion. For that I vowed to make him pay.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING I stood in my school uniform with my back pressed to the thick, rounded logs of the old building. I was hidden from view by the utility shack. I listened as the other kids filed out for the daily three-kilometer trek to school. I knew I would be punished for being late, but what I’d set out to do was more important than class. I waited for the ring of voices in the crystalline air to fade, and sneaked back to the main building. Observe now the young hero: my earflaps blowing in the wind, the yarn at the bottom of my sweater (already too short) coming loose as I pull on it nervously. The cold air stabs my lungs. As my shoes crunch on the frozen snow, I try to warm myself up with a vision of Mark Pavlovich and me, writing a second letter to my mother (I have yet to receive an answer to my first). The mistaken first impression he had of me as a liar has been corrected now that I’ve shared with him what I know. Putting his hand on my shoulder, he tells me I’m a boy who can be relied on. The warmth on my shoulder lingers as I compose the letter to my mother.

  When I reached the director’s office, I found him not alone. Through the door, left partly open, I could hear voices—one gruff and serious, another carefully accommodating. From my vantage point I glimpsed the polish of military boots, the swish of heavy greatcoats of a blue-gray color normally identified with members of the militzia. My eye followed the coat upward to its lapelled shoulder. There were two of them inside: one leaning over Guchkov’s desk in a way that seemed vaguely threatening, while the other paced the room, brushing hoarfrost from his ursine hat. Their heavy boots had left tracks of melted snow on the floor. Holding my breath, I tried to hear what these policemen were saying. The story seemed to be that a local boy in town had been sent to the hospital after a bloody knife fight. The director asked if the boy had identified the assailant. One of the policemen smiled and assured him that they had gotten all the information from him they needed. “Then I suppose you’re free to do your work,” Mark Pavlovich said. The tone of their voices demonstrated dissatisfaction with this decoy answer. The one who had not spoken before began talking about “habitual recidivists” whose ages would not shield them from the full force of the law.

  In an instant, like lightning illuminating the night, I knew they were talking about Baldy. Inhaling the scent of their damp army coats, I could feel my pulse quicken. Yes, that’s what Baldy had sold his scarf for—to buy another knife! It was as though, walking onto the stage for a simple audition, I’d suddenly found myself in front of a packed house. If ever there was a chance to show myself to be the upright and courageous boy I wanted the world to know, it was this. I felt I had to knock on the door at once and tell these uniformed men all I knew.

  I could hear Mark Pavlovich responding with his agreeable yet firm note of protest: “We do not allow knives or any weapons on the premises, and our children do not carry them.”

  For reasons I couldn’t explain, I felt crippled, unable to make myself knock on the door. Even now it’s hard to explain, but somehow the presence of these militzioneri unmanned me. Something about their boots, their cold, damp smells inside that old tobaccoey cupboard of an office, but most of all their voices. I was haunted by the memory of my mother’s arrest. Even as I stood paralyzed, I feared that they would start hounding Mark Pavlovich to produce his secret ledger,
in which my own name appeared beside the name of a woman imprisoned for treason. If I walked in now, I would lose my cover for good. They would want to know who I was, and Guchkov would have to tell them. Perhaps for the first time in my life I perceived what it meant to be a “hero” in the original, Greek sense of the word: one for whom any victory must be rewarded by some punishing irony from the jealous gods.

  I did nothing. I listened to the rising and falling pitch of the trio inside, letting the minutes lapse. At last the voices resolved into a kind of tense agreement, with Mark Pavlovich allowing that all rooms would be made available for searching. I could tell this was not a satisfying answer for them. One of the policemen smiled sardonically. “You can be certain we’ll do that,” he said.

  Mark Pavlovich escorted them out. Their heavy coats brushed against me, but they took no notice. Only the director’s eyebrow lifted as he passed me by. One of the policemen roughly kicked away the snow that was piled up on the back steps before closing the door. When the director turned, I saw the dark circles around his eyes. “How long have you been standing there?”

  Something in his face made me too frightened to speak.

  “What is it? Did you swallow your tongue?”

  “I know something.”

  He let me enter his office. “All right.”

  I told him about the screaming woman at the bazaar and about Baldy’s missing scarf.

  My confession seemed to make him more tired. “His name is Lyova, not Baldy. Is that what you came to tell me?”

  “It was him.”

  “You saw him sell his scarf and buy a knife.”

  “No, but she said…”

  “That’s enough. We don’t trade in empty accusations here. You’ve let your imagination carry you away. Who else have you shared this fantasy with?”

  “No one…!”

  “Then keep it to yourself. Understood? Now, go.”

  —

  THE FOLLOWING DAY MORE snow fell in large wet flakes. I watched it sift down as I walked, dejected, from the schoolhouse back to the children’s home. What good had come of being “good”? The clownish look of superiority still hovered over Baldy’s face. He was afraid of no one and recognized no authority. That was the insight underscoring his mockery: Mark Pavlovich wanted to boss us around like he was our father, but he wasn’t our father. And he was no hero. All the real heroes were dead. I removed my gloves and felt the stinging cold on my fingers. From the side of the road I scooped up a handful of sharp pebbles and sculpted it into a hard snowball. Without conscious effort I beamed it at a kid walking two meters ahead of me. To my surprise, it hit him in the back of his hat, pitching him facedown into the snow.